Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Aug 23;119(34):e2115900119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2115900119. Epub 2022 Aug 16.
Following the 2020 general election, Republican elected officials, including then-President Donald Trump, promoted conspiracy theories claiming that Joe Biden's close victory in Georgia was fraudulent. Such conspiratorial claims could implicate participation in the Georgia Senate runoff election in different ways-signaling that voting doesn't matter, distracting from ongoing campaigns, stoking political anger at out-partisans, or providing rationalizations for (lack of) enthusiasm for voting during a transfer of power. Here, we evaluate the possibility of any on-average relationship with turnout by combining behavioral measures of engagement with election conspiracies online and administrative data on voter turnout for 40,000 Twitter users registered to vote in Georgia. We find small, limited associations. Liking or sharing messages opposed to conspiracy theories was associated with higher turnout than expected in the runoff election, and those who liked or shared tweets promoting fraud-related conspiracy theories were slightly less likely to vote.
在 2020 年大选之后，包括时任总统唐纳德·特朗普在内的共和党当选官员宣传阴谋论，声称乔·拜登在佐治亚州的微弱胜利是欺诈行为。这些阴谋论可能以不同的方式暗示参与佐治亚州参议院决选-表明投票无关紧要，分散了正在进行的竞选活动的注意力，煽动对外部党派的政治愤怒，或者为在权力交接期间（缺乏）投票热情提供合理化解释。在这里，我们通过结合对 40000 名在佐治亚州注册投票的 Twitter 用户的在线选举阴谋参与行为的行为测量和选民投票的行政数据，评估与投票率的任何平均关系的可能性。我们发现了很小的、有限的关联。喜欢或分享反对阴谋论的信息与决选中的高投票率有关，而喜欢或分享支持与欺诈相关的阴谋论的推文的人投票的可能性略低。
